ST. LOUIS, Missouri, January 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Elsevier today announces its new iCONSULT service for the hospital and group medical practice community. iCONSULT delivers real-time clinical decision support by putting evidence-based, point-of-care clinical reference directly into the electronic workflow of health practitioners. By adding value to the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, iCONSULT will increase the quality of patient care by promoting best clinical practice and improving the consistency and quality of decision-making.

"Elsevier's iCONSULT service will put valuable medical information into the hands of the health practitioner while working in the hospital and medical practice, which is exactly where they need it," says Joseph E. Scherger, MD, MPH, Clinical Professor, University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. "The Electronic Health Record is the perfect place for clinical information to reside. Having this knowledge embedded in the EHR, provides instant access to information on diagnoses, therapy options, and patient education - without the need to leave the EHR environment. We used to go to separate websites - or the bookshelf - for this information. However, this was time-consuming and it was never in context to the care of a specific patient which is now so critical to reducing error and raising the quality of health care delivered at a hospital or medical practice".

Elsevier, a world-leading science and medical publisher, developed iCONSULT to integrate its clinical reference content directly into the Electronic Health Record and enhance clinical decision support. FIRSTConsult, Elsevier's premier point of care medical reference tool will be the first product enabled to work in the electronic health record through the iCONSULT service. FIRSTConsult is part of the MD Consult Clinical Knowledge System and provides immediate access to continuously updated evidence-based information on evaluation, diagnosis and treatment of a variety of disease categories, enabling health practitioners to make immediate, accurate medical decisions.

"iCONSULT is part of our overall strategy to put more and more relevant clinical information directly at the point of care. We are very excited that healthcare information technology vendors see iCONSULT as an immediate enhancement to their EHR and we continue to discuss interoperability of iCONSULT with EHR vendors worldwide," says Daniel Pollock, Clinical Decision Support Executive Publisher.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier's 7,000 employees in 74 offices worldwide publish more than 1,800 journals and 2,200 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/), MD Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (http://www.news.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).